A To-Do List for the 21st Century: 6 Things for 6C

November 10, 2012

Now that well-known eco-extremist orgainzation PricewaterhouseCoopers has issued a report indicating that, as things stand now, their best guess is for 6C of warming across the world by the end of the century, it’s a good time to reconsider our global to-do list for the century.

6C? I thought more than 2C was unsustainable? Are Price Waterhouse playing the global insurance market perhaps?

The solutions to mitigating Climate change all begin with transformation of global Human consciousness, which is still something nation states are slow to admit and adopt, in favour of short term gains in Carbon energy hikes to prop up consumerism and socioeconomics?

Can we solve both the dilemma’s of mitigating global debts and Climate change with a unified philosophy and strategy?

Technology is displacing jobs from production of goods, yet these crises also provide opportunity for change in perspective towards provision for employment in social and health care, housing and community, energy usage and frugality?

Change in Global social philosophy may be crucial to the offset of catastrophe and displaced communities?

Terminology can lull.. ‘Greenhouse Effect’ sounds promising to some farmers here (“maybe we can sell produce at year-round markets”);
‘Global Warming’ doesn’t sound bad when experiencing subzero temperatures.
They don’t reckon with what happens far away, with oil spills in Louisiana affecting Alabama, etc; perhaps they think of the way it used to be when it was ‘these United States’ rather than the United States as it is today. In Europe- even though it is divided into nations- they think of themselves as interconnected because of the higher population density and that Europe’s recorded history goes back a long way;
whereas the US is much younger and Americans think of the western lands as being frontier though there’s been no real frontier since 1890—save for perhaps Alaska.

I notice quite some scepticism and anger in this comment thread. CygnusX1 suspects PWC of “playing the global insurance market”, while Kelly rails against the venality of our (or at least America’s) public institutions.

Such scepticism and anger is to some extent justified, to be sure, but I wonder where you want to go with it. One of the great evils in society today, in my view, is the tendency of people to complain about things they have no intention of dou anything about themselves. It’s not that it’s wrong to complain (on the contrary, complaining serves an essential social function), but like any technology it can be misused. We’d do better to think of ways to promote the kind of action that Marcelo advocates than just wallow in anger and scepticism.

Posted by Intomorrow on 11/13 at 03:27 PM

Pete,
cannot speak for CygnusX1, Kelly or anybody else, but I notice more & more the double-bind in America: the Right wants to remain in the zeitgeist, tethered to the legacy of, their favorite year, 1776, while moving into 2013 and beyond. Fantastically ambitious of them—it would take Jesus Christ Himself to arrange such a dual existence.

There are two levels of change needed to address climate change. The first is the corporate/government level. This is where we substitute nuclear power for coal or require the same pollution controls for diesel as for gasoline engines. They are broad reaching changes in public policy.
The second is personal. This where you change the kind of light bulb you use, or where you decide to walk to the grocery store instead of driving. They are things that we can do now without waiting for anybody to give us permission.
The world needs both levels of commitment to change. If we aren’t making the shift in our personal lives, how will we convince government and corporations that they need to change policy?

Posted by Intomorrow on 11/14 at 06:26 PM

“If we aren’t making the shift in our personal lives, how will we convince government and corporations that they need to change policy?”

This is correct, and it is embarassing to admit we differ little in our behavior from those above us, merely as a matter of scale: the residue of the upper classes may be higher quantitatively but not qualitatively. The carbon footprint left by an old clunker driven by someone at the bottom may v. well be worse—as most of you know—than a 2013 high-end model. As Marcelo pointed out, it is also the petro-produced food inside the person driving that auto and the residues from manufacturing, maintaining the auto.
One difference, though, between ‘them’ and ‘us’ (and we shouldn’t be ashamed to discuss it for fear of being unhumble, false modesty being worse than conceit) is we do in fact want to change many things the ‘Right’ [the old-fashioned] does not want to alter. The majority at IEET have little/no use for nationalism, whereas nationalism appears to have replaced religion as the nexus of the Right; and it isn’t necessarily elitist nationalism.. rather a sort-of national socialism lite; it isn’t socialism yet it contains proletarian elements appealing to the uneducated. Rush Limbaugh isn’t an elitist protecting us from the mob, Rush Limbaugh is the mob: a modernised Father Coughlin. Sean Hannity appeals not as much to elitist tendencies but to national values of ‘us’ being the nation and ‘them’ being the foreign Other who is to be annihilated if they should get in the way of the national interest. It ties in with a national interest in obtaining petroleum from nations threatened by the foreign Other. Thus while domestic sources of petroleum are to be increased (and they are), foreign petroleum is to be obtained for the dual purposes of obtaining oil from sources other than domestic, plus in service of annihilating the Other.
@Pete, now that Communism is finished, the ‘Left’ is no longer to be feared, it’s ineffectual—while the ‘Right’ is quite effectual because they have had five thousand recorded years of practice.

Posted by Christian Corralejo on 11/14 at 08:18 PM

@ Pastor Alex

At least in the U.S., the “Left” still has a lot of power, particularly over the media. I even recall hear that other countries are pointing out how biased our media is.